Consumer Debt Paydown Crimps GDP Growth

It’s election season so both candidates would love for you to think that the POTUS has a lot of control over economic growth, but this week we got a report that sheds light on one of the major reasons the U. S. economy is growing at around 2%, down from its long-term average of around 3% per year. The New York Federal Reserve reported that credit card debt balances last quarter dropped a $672 billion, a level not seen since 2002. It also marks a 22.4% decline from the peak we saw in the fourth quarter of 2008.

So how exactly has this de-leveraging trend negatively impacted GDP growth? Well, consumer spending represents about 70% of GDP, so a drop in credit card balances of $200 billion over the last few years represents a lot of money that was sent off to pay bills, not spent on goods and services. Toss in another $100 billion of spending that would normally be incremental over that time period due to overall growth in the underlying economy, and you can see that about $300 billion of consumer spending has been absent from the system, compared to what would have been normal.

With annual U.S. GDP at around $15 trillion, this consumer credit card de-leveraging represents about 2% of GDP growth lost. Over 3-4 years, that comes out to about 0.5% GDP impact per year. In a world where GDP growth has dropped a full percentage point from its long-term normalized level, consumer debt repayments account for a major portion of that slowdown. You aren’t likely to hear much about that on the campaign trail, but politicians rarely deal with facts and truths when it comes to hot-button issues like the economy.

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